Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession

by William R. Keylor

Overview

Most informed observers would agree that an inordinate proportion of the most exciting, innovative, and ground-breaking work in the field of historical scholarship since the First World War has taken place in the French university system. In this book Keylor describes the establishment of history as an academic discipline in France between 1870 and 1914 and the formation of the "scientific" school of historical writing in the French university system.

In a lucid study the author explains the complex process by which the new discipline of history was organized, furnished with a set of professional goals, and provided with the theoretical and institutional means of achieving them. Keylor discusses the multifarious problems that confronted the university historians as they sought to transform their craft from an avocation of amateurs into a scholarly discipline pursued by trained specialists employed by the university system: the growing tensions between the universitaires and the literary historians outside the academy; the conflict between the "scientific" claims of the French historical school and its commitment to employ history for patriotic and political ends; and the interdisciplinary rivalries between academic history and the fledgling discipline of sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674497849
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/05/1975
Edition description:	Reprint 2014
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part One: The Era of Hopes and Accomplishments

1. Prelude to Reform, 1866-1870

2. History's Role in the Regeneration of the Fatherland

3. The Institutionalization of Historical Study in the New Sorbonne

4. In Search of La Méthode Historique

5. History as Civic Instruction: The Conflict of Science and Patriotism

6. The Record of Scholarly Achievement, 1876-1900

Part Two: Interdisciplinary Conflicts and Revised Objectives

7. The Challenge of the Science of Society

8. Henri Berr and the "Terrible Craving for Synthesis"

9. The Dissolution of the Republican Consensus

10. Social Science and the Restoration of the Republican Synthesis

Epilogue

Appendices

Notes

Works Cited

Index